Proportional representation works and works well

Re: An alternative to proportional representation

David Graham displays a shocking lack of understanding about how proportional representation (PR) works when he call it "governance by the parties". Had he bothered to examine how PR operates in any of the 100 or so countries that use it, he would have discovered just how badly mistaken he is.

No matter which electoral system you choose, candidates are chosen by their parties. However, under First Past the Post (FPTP), parties have been known to drop party hacks into safe seats - and there are a lot of safe seats in a system where it rare for a winning candidate to need more than 1/3 of the votes.

Under PR however, candidates have to be chosen according to their ability to pull votes. After all, the list is a major selling point in your party's campaign.

And no matter which electoral system you use, campaigns still need to be fought door-to-door. You still need local candidates in each region of the country to attract the voters to their party.

In PR, candidates make it to the top of a party list by being able to attract voters, not by being party hacks. Dumping party hacks on the voters is actually a feature of FPTP where voters have little choice over who they vote for.

There is a reason why Australia is the only significant jurisdiction (Fiji and Papua New Guinea also use it) to use Instant Runoff (IRV) in its elections. That reason is IRV is the only system worse than FPTP for electing legislative assemblies. Under IRV, it is possible for a party that no one picks as their first choice to win every seat. While this is an extreme example, IRV elections tend to elect governments even less representative of the popular vote than FPTP.

With IRV, not all votes are equal. You may get your first choice or your second choice or your third choice or you may not get any of your choices. Under IRV, almost half the votes in a riding may be discarded entirely because they didn't include the winning candidate. And even those who found the winning candidate somewhat acceptable often don't get their real preference counted.

Nor does IRV fix FPTP's problem of dumping party hacks into safe seats. You still need to vote "strategically" for the party, not the candidate, to prevent the party you don't want to form the government from winning the most seats.

In short, IRV not only doesn't fix any of the problems of FPTP but it makes some problems even worse. Moreover, we don't need a system that counts some votes more than others. We need a system where every vote is counted equally. PR is the only system that does that.

Rather than repeating unsubstantiated allegations about PR, Graham would do his readers a real service by actually doing some research about how the various voting systems work in practice. There is a reason why most of the world's democracies have switched to PR. It works and it works well.

Gary Dale